Creepy first-person adventure The Guest now has a free demo on Steam

The Guest is a “first-person exploration game” in which you're locked inside a gloomy hotel room and have to figure out who's responsible for putting you there, and why they've done it. It's set in the 1980s and promises to be a moody, mysterious experience, with “events where we will control our character in a critical mental state, breaking the games rhythm and looking for new experiences.”

I'm honestly not sure what that means, but I'm inclined to think that the twisted verbiage, and typos on the Steam page, reflect the fact that developer Team Gotham is a Spanish studio, and thus dealing with English as a second language. Regardless of the reason, the game is the thing, and you may now give it a go without risk or cost thanks to the free demo.

The demo is a fairly brief thing: I got from the start to the finish, with a fair amount of poking around, in about 15 minutes. But it's also quite promising, as it sets up the tale of mysterious Soviet scientist Dr. Evgueni Leonov, who has traveled to the US to attend the University of Boston's 9th Annual International Scientific Congress. It starts off as a fairly conventional mystery—who broke the door?—but gets weird in a hurry once you've made your way into the bathroom. And then of course it ends, abruptly and without warning (but also at an appropriate juncture), because it is just a demo.

The full version of The Guest is available now for 25 percent off its regular $10/£7 price until March 17.